CA Surveys 300 IT Execs

Last fall CA hit up IT management at shops earning $250M+ revenue to check the pulse of virtualization. 300 professionals from the United States, U.K., Germany, Australia, and Korea replied. They're sharing the goods. While none of the results struck me as counter-intuitive, the survey seems fairly well executed and offers good insight to non-U.S. markets. CA has made the PowerPoint available here. An additional nice touch is the inclusion of embedded sample data rather than basic JPEG infographics; those who care can dig through more than 30 worksheet tabs to play with the data.

Average number of employees per organization was in the 30K range.

The big news: 88% of US respondents are using some form of virtualization in their company. Adoption stats are lower outside the U.S., with 59% in Europe and 46% in the Pacific sample.

In a somewhat curious question, respondents were asked to force-rank the relative importance of virtualizing each of the following areas at your company. Looking at the worldwide pool, servers ranked first and desktops ended up as the least important target for virutalization. Storage, applications, and 'entire data center' rounded out the top four after 'servers'.

When asked for 'success' rankings for their respective companies' virtualization efforts, servers toped the list again, with only 56% claiming 'extremely successful' worldwide. Application grids don't seem to be the poster child for virtualization in the U.S.; only 15% of domestic respondents gave high rankings to their deployment results.While security concerns top the survey list of management concerns, U.S. execs are either more confident or more trusting than their foreign peers. Roughly 10% more Euro and Asia/Pacific respondents trump security as a major concern.

Survey data is available on perceived efficacy of VM management tools, utilization rates for physical and virt servers, and one vs. many vendor models. If this data is representative, roughly half the folks out there are currently running more than one flavor of virtualization, and less than half have any concrete, long-term plans for moving to a one-vendor model.

I recommend you take a look if you care about virtualization in the enterprise. Be sure to take a grain of salt, too. Recognize that CA sells VM management tools, and use the data for your own purposes. It's going in my 'keeper' file.